Heidegger's Bible Handbook: OT Apocrypha: Added to the Canonical Books

8.  The cause and time of the Apocryphal Books being conjoined with the Canonical is elicited.

Codex Vaticanus

Moreover, the cause of the reception of these books into the Canon or Catalogue of Ecclesiastical reading is undoubtedly no other than because already previously the Hellenistic Jews living ἐν διασπορᾷ, in the Diaspora, had conferred something upon them.  For, just as almost all those were composed by such, so they, read by Hellenists generally, although with the Hebraizing Jews residing at Jerusalem opposing, they obtained some value, that they might be conjoined in the same volume with the remaining books ἀνενδοιάστως/ unquestionably Divine and properly Canonical.  But at what time, and by whom, that conjunction and connection of the Apocryphal books with those truly Canonical happened, the learned dispute, and the case is still being adjudicated.  Nevertheless, this is sufficiently probable, that it was done at length after the publication of the Greek version by the Seventy and others.  For Greek things were more readily able to be accommodated to Greeks, especially since those doctrines do not completely disagree, and the series of Jewish matters after the passing of the Prophets is woven together in the Apocryphal histories.  Of which opinion that argument is not trifling, that Josephus constructed the books of his Ἀρχαιολογίας, antiquarian lore, not only from the Canonical Writings of the Old Testament, but also from the Apocryphal books of the Maccabees; although the distinction that comes between the Canonical and the Apocryphal books, in book I contra Apionem he does not conceal, but rather evidently declares.  Yet they do not appear to have been connected with the Canonical books at one and the same time, since the learned with good reason conjecture that some, especially Wisdom and Sirach, were even composed after the time of Christ.  Whence some landed on the opinion, that the Alexandrian Jews, by whom especially those Apocryphal books, equally with the Septuagint Version, were in use, bound them together in one volume with the Sacred Books.  But others assert that Theodotion, who lived in the latter half of the Second Century, while he was striving to make his own commendable version of the Old Testament, conjoined the books everywhere sought out into one volume with the authentic books, and that thus they obtained by degrees some authority among those that were converted to Christianity, both of the Hellenistic Jews, and of the Gentiles, and also in those Churches in which the Apostles themselves or the Evangelists did not preach.  Whatever the case may be, that in the age of Jerome and Origen those books already appear arranged in one volume with the Canon, two most famous Greek Codices, Vaticanus[1] and Alexandrinus,[2] make most certain.

[1] Codex Vaticanus is a fourth century Greek uncial of the Alexandrian text-type.  It became known to western scholars as a result of correspondence between Erasmus and Vatican librarians.

[2] Codex Alexandrinus is a fifth century Greek unicial of the Alexandrian text-type.  Western scholarship was introduced to its contents, when it was given by Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople to Charles I of England.